It’s an idea so brilliant, it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: what if Freaky Friday fell on Friday The 13th? It’s the latest high-concept genre mash-up from filmmaker Christopher Landon, who with Happy Death Day, and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U, made a name for himself as the man to go to for playful slasher movies. Now he’s done it again with Freaky, which takes Kathryn Newton’s high-schooler Millie, and sticks her in the body of Vince Vaughn’s knife-wielding mass-murderer, the Blissfield Butcher – and vice versa. How’s that for a killer set-up?
“My good friend Michael Kennedy [co-writer] gave me the one-line summary, and I just jumped at it,” Landon tells Empire. “What draws me to these genre mash-ups is there's a sort of familiarity, and because people think they know what the movie is, you have an opportunity to turn it upside down on them. Body swap movies are always on the cutesy side. The fact that we get to make it incredibly violent and gory is just that extra bit of fun for me.”
Watch the ridiculously fun trailer above, and then dive into Empire’s breakdown interview with Landon himself – talking sadistic murders, the film’s no-holds-barred R-rated approach, and how hard it is to rev a chainsaw.
Meek Millie
Meet our young hero, 17 year-old high-schooler Millie, played by Kathryn Newton – who you might recognise from Big Little Lies, or Blockers. “Millie is a very shy, introverted girl, who's recently lost her father and is really struggling to figure out how she fits into the world,” says Landon. “She’s terribly co-dependent and is always trying to people-please at the expense of her own pleasure and joy in life.” If that’s how she starts out, like all body-swap films, Freaky is really about an internal transformation. “She has this really unique journey in the film – when she switches bodies with a serial killer she comes to inhabit this very big, scary person. She begins to find herself inside someone else's body.”
Wink wink
Where the Happy Death Day films were playful with genre, they weren’t meta on that Scream level. But Freaky – with its ‘If this were a horror movie…’ moment – finds the filmmaker leaning more into that self-referentiality. “Michael and I made a decision early on to wink a bit more than we usually would,” Landon says. “But it's a delicate balance, you don't want to overplay that idea because it can take you out of the movie. Everything that we do in the movie we play for real, with real stakes.”
Butchered
And, of course, this is a horror film – step in Vince Vaughn as the Blissfield Butcher, wielding a big old blade. “We wanted to play on the notion that this is an iconic killer who has a lot of local folklore built around him. He's the quintessential killing machine, like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger,” Langdon explains. “We wanted a robotic killing machine, and Vince definitely delivered. That's part of the fun of watching him inhabit this girl's body.”
New perspective
Speaking of which, here’s the twist: Millie isn’t dead, but trapped in the Butcher’s body. And now, the Butcher is hiding in Millie’s body. “We had this added layer of high stakes, because Millie's inhabiting a body that's incredibly recognisable. This is a known killer,” Landon laughs. “The challenge is incredibly high, because she could easily get caught. It's a big part of the fun of the movie.”
It’s hard to say who’s having a better time from this point on – Vaughn, getting to play it up as a teenage girl, or Newton, dialling up the danger as a ruthless murder-machine. “It was a rare opportunity to get to do two characters instead of just one and they both really relished it,” says Landon of his stars. “Frankly the movie doesn't work if they didn't. Both Kathryn and Vince made video diaries in character so that they could study each other in their spare time. After that, we did a lot of in-person rehearsal work, understanding each other's mannerisms and physicality and the way they walk and talk and move.”
And while there are yuks and yucks to be had in the body-swap, as with the unexpected emotion of Happy Death Day 2U, there’s pathos to be mined here too. “It was really nice, especially for Vince, to really get to dig into Millie's character and understand her,” says Landon. “He's very funny in the film, but he's not just trying to play stuff for jokes. He's playing it real, and I think it's in that absurd authenticity that the movie shines.”
Hasta la vista, baby
Enough about the emotion – bring on the kills, starting with a shattering icy death for one poor, unsuspecting student. It’s the first of many, teases Landon. “Sometimes I pause and I think there's something wrong with me, because I really do take so much pleasure in coming up with terrible ways for people to die. And this movie has a bunch of just really nasty, nasty deaths,” he says. And where both Happy Death Day films ultimately went for a PG-13, this one is undoubtedly an R. “I did not want to make this kind of a slasher movie without an R-rating – so much of how this thing works is watching a young, shy girl commit unspeakable acts of murder,” Landon laughs. “It's not fun if it's bloodless! So we went for the R, and I'm glad that we did.”
The clock is ticking
As if the murders and the body-swapping wasn’t enough, Millie is facing a race-against-time to return to her own body before the switch becomes permanent. If Happy Death Day 2U riffed hard on Back To The Future Part II, the genre-fied high school ticking-clock feels of a piece with Zemeckis’ iconic original. “It just raises the stakes and creates a sense of urgency both for the characters and for the audience,” he says. “The Back To The Future films are obviously a huge, huge influence for me, and even other random fun classic movies like Speed that have a mechanism built in to keep the tension at a certain level. Another well I draw from is the almost Amblin quality – I recently watched E.T., and E.T. has its own clock. It's just a really marvellous way to keep the engine going.”
Newtons of fun
The shining light of Happy Death Day was lead Jessica Rothe, delivering gloriously committed performances in both films – and it seems that Kathryn Newton is putting in a similarly committed turn in Freaky, playing a serial killer pretending to be a teenage girl. “We worked together on Paranormal Activity 4, and I've been so inspired and impressed by her career and her growth as an actor,” says Landon. “She really understood Millie as a character, but getting into the mind of a killer who kills with such vigour and passion is a whole other ballgame. She really found her rhythm. I was afraid of her! She's incredibly intense. As an actor she's a highly focused, competitive person, and that's what I knew was inside her from the beginning. That really comes out in this role.”
Revved up
Judging by this shot of a bloodied Newton whirring up a chainsaw, Landon was right to be afraid. “If we’d shot that at the beginning of production, I think it could have been a slightly different scene. But because we shot that towards the end, she had been this killing machine for so long,” he recalls. “I picked up that chainsaw while we were filming and I was like, 'Oh my god, this thing weighs a ton'. To pull the chain on it was really tough, I kept struggling with it. And then camera rolls, and she grabs that thing like it's a toothpick and just ripped it. I was like, 'Oh my gosh – you're such a killer now!'” And if the sight of revving chainsaw promises lopped limbs and gore galore, that’s not even the half of it, according to the director. “The chainsaw is like the nicest kill in this movie, by the way,” he chuckles. “That's her going easy on someone.”
Coming soon to… cinemas?
While there’s no UK date planned yet, Freaky is expected to hit cinemas here in the coming months – though, as with all film releases this year, that very much depends on the state of play as the Coronavirus pandemic rolls on. “Any filmmaker hopes that people will see a movie in a theatre, but above all my hope is that people can see a movie safely in a cinema,” says Landon. “That's paramount for me and everyone at Universal as well. We will accept whatever happens, in terms of whether people can actually physically go and see it in a movie theatre, or if they're going to need to sit it out and enjoy the movie at home, but that's something I think we're all very open to. Everyone has had to learn to be very adaptable through all of this, because it is an ever-changing situation. But I am excited and eager for people to see the movie, because I think it will be a really fun, exciting escape during a really difficult time. If there's one thing I think the movie delivers on, it's fun.” Bring on the (s)laughter.
Freaky is expected in UK cinemas later this year.